I do hope that we can move and align annotation with leader lines at some point (soon?) because I deal with it a lot. If I can get away with it I use graphics just because I can move those as needed, but sometimes, you just need feature linked annotation.
re: the error message... this is what happened in a different project
It is true that not all of the layers in the project are the same projection, but for what I was trying to accomplish, I wasn't clear on why that would matter.
And this item in the release notes for 2.8.2 is what made me think that it had been addressed, but I haven't dug into it too deeply yet.
Thanks for your reply!